I've been reading the 'Wayward Children' series aloud to my better half of late and we're six books in right now, which has served as a useful reminder as I get myself up to date. This is the eleventh volume in the series and will stay the latest until January, when 'A Song of Sugar Sparrows' is due, but it returns us to characters we met much earlier on, most obviously Nancy, who we met in book one at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Girls but who found her door once more and returned to the Halls of the Dead.

I've long had the notion that Seanan McGuire is a patient writer with a long memory. Like writers the world over, she's willing to introduce characters in long running series like 'Wayward Children' and 'InCryptid' and have them play their parts, but then leave them behind as both single volume and series arcs move on without them. However, unlike those other writers, she remembers them and, at some point when the time seems right, returns to them. That seems especially applicable in these two series, where the focus tends to shift from book to book.

In some ways, this one seems very familiar indeed.

We start in a location we know, the Halls of the Dead, where Nancy is an even better living statue than she was when we left her there in 'Beneath the Sugar Sky'. After all, because time moves at different speeds in the worlds behind different doors, she's had years to master her art. We feel that and the stillness it evokes is incredibly calming. However, times are changing and the dead have started to take the living, swarming out of the rooms and into the quiet where they wait for errant movements to betray statues, then take them down. Nancy's so good that she isn't one of the victims, but she realises that something must be done.

So, she returns to Eleanor West's, arriving in the basement in a strikingly similar manner to Jack in Jill's body in 'Come Tumbling Down' and enlisting many of the usual suspects for a quest in very much the same way that Jack did. Even the participants are similar. That time it was Kade, Sumi, Christopher and a new girl to the series, Cora. This time it's Kade, Sumi, Christopher and another new girl to the series, Talia, whose birth name is Ming-Yue, and whose door took her to a world of moths called Yuemingyuan, the Garden of Moonlight, where she was a court poet.

However, this isn't just a new riff on an old template. The Moors and the Halls of the Dead are far from the same place and the quests these characters take there are very different, even though their individual backgrounds endow them with roles these stories are happy to involve. Nobody's ever just a hanger on in a 'Wayward Children' quest. In one sense I prefer 'Come Tumbling Down', because its story was deeper and stronger and perhaps more substantial. However, that doesn't mean there aren't ways in which I prefer 'Through Gates of Garnet and Gold' because there are. I just can't talk about them in a review, beyond nodding back to McGuire's patience and memory.

Rather oddly, Nancy diminishes as a character here. She's never just a damsel in distress, but she knows she needs help to solve this problem and leans a little too heavily into her friends doing so. Kade and Christopher play the parts we've come to expect from them, which doesn't lessen their deeds here but perhaps lessen them a little for us, because we've seen them do this before. While Sumi could sit alongside them, because she too does what she does, but she also finds a foil in the Lord of the Dead and serves as an utterly glorious reality check against absolute rule. This may be Sumi's finest hour, though I'll have to revisit that verdict after 'A Song of Sugar Sparrows' tells her origin story.

That leaves Talia, who's not just new to the series as a character but as a difference. Everyone is a difference in 'Wayward Children', but they're all different in their own particular ways. Difference may serve as a common factor, appropriately so, but that doesn't mean that everyone's suddenly going to feel like they belong in one happy group at Eleanor West's school. Many of the biggest joys in the series are seeing how characters with substantial differences find compatibilities. That gives every reader who feels difference in their bones hope that there are people out there who may not be the same but are close enough to understand.

And, while I'm hardly a moth girl myself, Talia's role as court poet resonated with me. Sure, she's a little convenient to this story, but I liked her immediately and appreciated her all the more after the story was done. I don't think it's unfair to suggest that every character in 'Wayward Children' is going to be somebody's favourite. There are no weak characters in the series, merely ones who resonate more or less with each of us, and Talia's right up there with my favourites, albeit maybe not quite as far up that list as Antsy. I want to read Talia's origin story soon.

Of course, I'm still waiting for Christopher's origin story and Kade's and Sumi's, though McGuire's delivering one of those in January. I'd like to read Nancy's too, because this isn't that and neither was 'Every Heart a Doorway', in which we met her, but it does deepen the mythology of the Halls of the Dead further than 'Beneath the Sugar Sky' did. It seems that stillness originated here as a defence mechanism, to keep the living safe from the dead. This also deepens the role of the Lord of the Dead, especially through Sumi's blistering honesty. This story could have unfolded in a very different way had he been a different character with a different role.

I liked this novella, which doesn't shock me. It's a Seanan McGuire, who doesn't disappoint even in weaker efforts. It's also a 'Wayward Children', a series that connected with me like few books ever have, from its very outset in 'Every Heart a Doorway'. In fact, it continues to resonate with me not only with each new volume but also with each older portal fantasy that I read, not least the most recent two books I've read for my children's genre classics project, 'Knock Three Times!' and 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'. Both play a little differently because of this series and that's far from a bad thing.

So, I'm caught up again, at least for another five months. Back to my efforts to do the same with a couple of other McGuire series, though I'm not complaining. I will never complain about the gifts that spring from prolificity! ~~ Hal C F Astell

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